Although the ideal goal of the game is to create a stable metro system, I think it would be fair to take into consideration that it is a metro system to a city or town. There should be a definite center where the map zooms out from and where most “residents” will go during the day.

Not all New Yorkers go to Times Square every day, and yet Times Square - 42 St / 42 St - Port Authority Bus Terminal is the busiest station in the subway system. Each citizen just has his or her own life - workplace, home, and so on. I do not see the point of directing most passengers to one station.

The squares function like this surely? In the initial stages of your city there’s only the one that all other nodes want to send some traffic towards, and as your city gets bigger some rival centres of interest sprout up, just as in real life most residents of major cities avoid the tourist-filled centre of town like the plague and go do their business elsewhere.

There are many urbanism models in the world. Which one is the best? I can’t tell.
Which one should minimetro base itself upon? I can’t either.

I just hope these different modes of layout/bonuses come with the different cities (or “choosing your won rules” dialog per game). This way we can include your idea of city center, which is fun and I would want to play, and some other people’s ideas, which are equally interesting

My view of city center would be having all the uniques in the center (think: I want to get this rare stuff like hobby, job, concerts but they’re only in the main part of town).
But it would make the game so much simpler and no fun

Having to route people to different uniques in different parts of town (or of the local region if you think of it this way) is what I like there. Just make sure there’s a connection

You could base it off the concentric rings model but the problem with this is there are very very very few cities that develop in this way. You will often get rings developing around several CBDs, which I believe is what the square symbolises. In London there are three centered around the Shard, Canary wharf and The City of London. (One of the quirks of London is that it is technically 2 cities, Google it ) This tends to kinda muck up typical geography models. What would be better is for each city to be custom made with several areas where squares “generally” pop up and the same with the special shapes which represent things like tourist attractions. Again this would be " generally" the scenario as if it happened every game then it would be too easy.